The German Genius

section) were introduced by Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826). Weber had a diseased hip and walked with a limp but he was a virtuoso of the guitar and an excellent singer, until he damaged his voice by accidentally drinking a glass of nitric acid. He was summoned to Dresden to take control of the opera house there and made the conductor (himself) the single most dominant force, setting a fashion that continues to this day. He too worked hard to counter the contemporary craze for Italian opera, based mainly on the works of Rossini. It was thanks to Weber that a German operatic tradition emerged that was to culminate in Wagner. 23 Weber’s own opera Der Freischütz , first performed in 1821, with Heinrich Heine in the audience, opened up a new world. In Der Freischütz the orchestra now became far more than a background factor for the voices. The strings and wind sections, for example, were co-opted to express their own individuality, to add mood and color. This advance allowed more scope for the conductor to shape the operatic experience. Opera had, more or less, achieved the form we now know.
    M USIC AS P HILOSOPHY
     
    The standard “backbone” of classical music consists today of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms—all German. This backbone emerged first, in Germany, at the turn of the nineteenth century and continued throughout the 1800s, with only Hector Berlioz, Frédéric Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Verdi among the great composers who were not German.
    But musical production is only half the picture. Just as the efflorescence of painting in the Italian Renaissance is now understood against the commercial and religious tendencies of the time, so in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, musical listening, musical consumption, musical understanding, were affected and influenced by the prevailing Idealistic philosophy. This is a long way from how we conceive the musical experience today.
    A completely new understanding of the arts—and in particular music—emerged in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. Listening, as Mark Evans Bonds has shown, took on a new seriousness, in particular in relation to instrumental music. 24
    At that time, the symphony was comparatively new. It emerged only in the 1720s, a development of the opera overture, itself often called a “symphony” at the time and a practice that did not die out until the 1790s. 25 Until 1800 or thereabouts, the symphony was much less important than the opera, and even Kant, notoriously, in the Critique of Judgment , dismissed instrumental music as “more pleasure than culture” (“ mehr Genuss als Kultur ”), on a par, he said, with wallpaper. He was impressed by the ability of music to move listeners but since instrumental music contained no ideas (because it used no words), he thought its effects must be transitory “which would, in time, dull the spirit.” 26 His views were widely shared, but around the turn of the century the status of the symphony underwent a profound change.
    One reason was the gradual shift from private to public performances, considered earlier. The wider audiences had wider tastes and consisted of the newly emerging middle classes eager to educate and improve themselves. Equally important—if not more so in the long run—were the changing attitudes toward the nature of art, in particular the relationship that came to be perceived between music and philosophy. This transformed the act of listening. 27
    This new aesthetic, which began to value instrumental music, was directly derived from Idealism, in which it was argued that the benefits to be obtained from art needed much more than “idle reception” but, rather, activity . Any given artwork, any product of genius, reflected a higher ideal realm that listeners had to work on, to play their part in. The rapture of music, the extent to which we are “carried away” during a performance, the “forgetting of the self,” became for many the first stage in the journey toward this other, higher realm. Beethoven himself believed that art could be a bridge between the earthly and the divine. 28
    This view was expanded during the 1790s. Schelling led the way in arguing that art and philosophy addressed the same basic issue, the link between the world of phenomena and the world of ideas. For him, sound was the “innermost” of the five senses; its very incorporeality meant that its “essence” was more ideal